Food-loving French are bereft of their butter

Their American counterparts eat a lot less and aren't dealing with a crisis

France is all out of butter at the moment. Reports Bloomberg’s Paris bureau chief, Geraldine Amiel: “Soaring global demand and falling supplies have boosted butter prices, and with French supermarkets unwilling to pay more for the dairy product, producers are taking their wares across the border. That has left the French, the world’s biggest per-capita consumers of butter, short of a key ingredient for their sauces and tarts.”

There’s been talk of a European butter shortage for months now, and the cause seems to be mainly the usual agricultural boom-bust-boom cycle: The 2007-2008 financial crisis hammered the dairy industry as global demand temporarily swooned, and in recent years European Union dairy market reforms brought prices down again. All that led dairy farmers to produce less. But global demand for butter has kept trending upwards, so prices have jumped. Add in some uniquely French characteristics — mainly the apparent refusal of the country’s supermarket chains to raise prices on butter — and you get episodes of butter hoarding and empty shelves. A crisis, yes, but one that will surely pass soon.

That line about the French being the world’s biggest per-capita consumers of butter caught my attention, though. Just how much butter are we talking about here? Eight kilograms (17.6 pounds) per person per year, according to a handy round-up of global butter consumption compiled by the Canadian Dairy Information Centre. Somebody on Reddit with the username RyanMAGA doesn’t think that’s a lot — “just 1 stick every five days per person.” The math is correct (we’re talking about a US-standard quarter-pound stick), but one stick per person every five days actually does seem like a lot. My wife and I are very pro-butter. We buy it in five-pound blocks from the farmer’s market. 

Overall, US per-capita butter consumption is about one-third of France’s. And lots of other countries out-butter us. Some of this is just historical differences in regional cuisines. Northern Europeans and South Asians cooked with butter, Southern Europeans and East Asians used vegetable oils. Mexicans traditionally cooked with lard. The US blends all these traditions, and not surprisingly ends up with per-capita butter consumption lower than in the butter countries and higher than in the non-butter countries. (Despite a growing appetite for butter-rich pastries in China, for example, per-capita consumption there in 2015 was still only 0.1 kilogram.)

Still, back in the 1920s and 1930s, Americans consumed even more butter per capita than the French do now.

That precipitous collapse starting in 1943 was mainly a story of substitution. Margarine had been long discriminated against by lawmakers as a threat to the dairy industry, but during World War II it gained favour as a cheaper alternative in a time of scarcity. The National Nutrition Conference for Defense in 1941 also seems to have marked the beginning of government-endorsed claims that vegetable-oil-derived margarine was better for you than animal fats such as butter.

For decades, health authorities in the US inveighed against the risk of animal fats, especially in the context of heart disease. Then it turned out that margarine probably wasn’t healthier at all. As I wrote in a column this spring, margarine consumption has been falling in the US since the early 1990s. But it’s been supplanted mainly by vegetable oils, not butter. 

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